Peninsula on the Brink

So far it’s only a war of words, but what a war. The vitriol spewed out on all sides in the confrontation of forces on the Korean peninsula is getting more poisonous by the hour. The exchange of threats and innuendoes escalated to a new level in the summit on June 16 at which U.S. President Barack Obama received South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak in the White House. If words were launched as missiles rather than missives, to judge by the results of the summit and the North Korean response, the United States and North Korea would be firing salvo after salvo in a widening war in which much of the North would be in ruins and parts of the U.S. in flames.

As it is, the war of words they’re waging gets more intense by the day with the dreaded word “nuclear” coming up with alarming frequency. It was one thing for North Korea to declare its need for nuclear weapons to “bolster defense” against the U.S. and to say it was producing ever more plutonium for atomic bombs and reveal its nascent program for enriching uranium for still more bombs. It was quite another, however, for President Obama, darling of the American liberals, to sign on to a joint statement with South Korea’s conservative President Lee, pledging the commitment of a continued “U.S. nuclear umbrella.”

That’s the verbal equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a bull, bandying about a term that’s going to provoke a torrent of snarling invective from North Korea on a scale far more venomous than the North’s response to the latest United Nations Security Council sanctions for detonating a nuclear device underground on May 25. It’s a phrase that U.S. officials may spout out such big talk in briefings, but they will avoid writing it into formal statements because it connotes such an obvious threat. If you’re going to talk about a “nuclear umbrella,” after all, does that mean you’re poised to drop one of them without much prior notice?

The phrase was sneaked in, almost deliberately buried, in a declaration issued in the names of both Obama and Lee under the flowery title of “joint vision for the alliance.” After a great deal of verbiage that seemed to be the presidential equivalent of a love-in, after promising to maintain “a robust defense posture, backed by allied capabilities,” the statement got to the real point. “The continuing commitment of extended deterrence, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella,” it said, “reinforces this assurance.” Those were the words the South Koreans wanted to hear. It was one thing for the United States to promise to defend South Korea, as it has since preserving the South in the Korean War, and it was fine for American commanders to talk about a nuclear umbrella over the region, but South Korean leaders wanted it in writing.

Naturally, Pyongyang has taken up the challenge. Perhaps the editorialists there already had their commentary ready for release the moment they saw the text of the statement from Washington. One North Korean newspaper promised to retaliate “one thousand times” for any assault on its territory – or its shipping. Just how or when or whether the North would retaliate was far from clear, but the motivation was obvious. Dear Leader Kim Jong-il seems compelled to show off his machismo while recovering, if indeed he really is recovering, from a stroke suffered nearly a year ago. He wants to show his restive generals he remains the boss while putting his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, still in his 20s, on a fast track to succeed him when he departs this world.

Kim Jong-il also counts on another audience – that is, the South Korean activists who so vociferously opposed President Lee during the demonstrations that went on for months last year over the reopening of the South’s market to American beef. The noise about “Mad Cow” disease was really about long-term leftist opposition to the resurgence of conservative rule and to much else that President Lee wants to do to enhance the power of the mighty chaebol or conglomerates that dominate the economy more thoroughly than they did before the 1997-1998 economic crisis. Leftist activists now have a new cause in the memory of Roh Moo-hyun, the former president who tragically took his own life in the midst of an investigation into corruption among members of his family, notably his wife. The corruption in this case was relatively small scale – about $6 million or so, a pittance compared to the massive fraud during the presidencies of Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, the generals who led the country after the assassination of the dictator Park Chung-hee in 1979. For that matter, greater corruption was discovered among the sons of the two other civilian presidents of recent memory, Kim Young-sam, elected in 1992, and his successor, Kim Dae-jung, elected in 1997 at the height of the economic crisis.

Roh Moo-hyun would undoubtedly have weathered the storm, perhaps with a wrist-slap probation or a suspended sentence, but with his death he has become a martyr to the left. They accuse Lee Myung-bak of having gone after him and members of his family in a spirit of vengeance that is all too typical of Korean politics. It seems significant that Dear Leader Kim Jong-il sent a message of condolence after the death of Roh, who had sought to perpetuate the Sunshine Policy of reconciliation initiated by Kim Dae-jung. Since his landslide victory over Roh’s former unification minister in December 2007, President Lee has managed to reverse the policy even while holding out the prospect of massive economic aid if only North Korea will come to terms.

The issue is that of “verification” of whatever North Korea claims to have done to get rid of its nukes. No one believes now that North Korea had any intention of disabling or dismantling its nuclear program, and North Korea has confirmed that by promising to rev up the facilities for fabricating nuclear devices with plutonium at their core at the Yongbyon facility and has acknowledged the existence of a separate program for developing highly enriched uranium for warheads. It was the existence of that program, which U.S. officials claim North Korea acknowledged in 2002, that detonated the 1994 Geneva agreement and set in motion the negotiating process that resulted in two new agreements in 2007 as a result of the six-party talks hosted by China. Now, all that is history as the sides line up for a new nuclear crisis. If much of the rest of the U.S.-South Korean “joint vision” was boilerplate, the emphasis on the “nuclear umbrella” was not. Regardless of whether Obama would ever pull the nuclear trigger and order a strike, say, on the North Korean nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, the message was obvious: In a showdown, we’ve got a lot more nukes than you do, and we’re willing to use them if that’s what it takes to stop your nonsense. In fact, when it comes to who’s really holding the nuclear club, Obama saw no reason to recognize North Korea as a nuclear power at all – the same view adopted by the U.S. after the first North Korean nuclear test in October 2006.

The “joint vision,” as envisioned by the American and South Korean presidents, standing side by side in the Rose Garden outside the White House, represents a triumph of diplomacy for South Korea at a critical juncture. Lee is under pressure not only from a militant North Korea but also from a militant political opposition that just can’t get over the fact that he defeated a leftist candidate in the December 2007 presidential election, reversing a decade of liberal leadership of South Korea. Lee this time did not go to Camp David, the presidential hideaway in the Maryland woods north of Washington, as he did for his first summit with U.S. President George W. Bush in April of last year. Lee was flattered at the time by the invitation, evidence of the rapport that he hoped to build with the White House in contrast to the uneasy meetings that his left-leaning predecessor, Roh Moo Hyun, had had with Bush over the previous five years.

Against the din of the latest North Korean rhetoric, however, this summit was far more meaningful than the first. The fact that American liberals think so highly of Obama added to the significance. Obama could speak out in language that critics of George W. Bush would have automatically denounced in knee-jerk unison had he dared to say anything so tough. No way, said Obama, could North Korea go on in “a pattern” of behaving “in a belligerent manner” and then waiting to be rewarded. “We are going to break that pattern,” said Obama. More menacingly, he said that “belligerent provocative behavior that threatens neighbors will be met with enforcement of the sanctions in place” – a reference to the UN Security Council sanctions calling on nations to search ships and planes suspected of carrying materiel for weapons of mass destruction or the missiles for delivering them to distant targets.

Such language was a far cry from the talk that had marked the later years of the Bush administration, not to mention that of his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. This president did not have to refer to the failed Geneva agreement of 1994, which Clinton and his top aides like to say had headed off the danger of war. Nor did he allude to the two agreements of 2007 that promised the North untold billions in return for disablement and dismantlement of everything to do with its nuclear program.

Presidents Obama and Lee did pay ritual obeisance to the concept of the six-nation talks, hosted by China, that resulted in the 2007 agreements. With North Korea declaring it will “never” return to the six-party process, such palaver has receded into the tortuous history of diplomacy on the Korean peninsula. Now all sides appear to be waiting for an “incident” – the actual search of a North Korean vessel, the “act of war” to which North Korea has promised to respond with equal force. In the meantime, just hours before the summit, North Korea played another card, that of the two women arrested on March 17 as they were reporting for Current TV, the internet cable network, along the Tumen River border between North Korean and China.

It did not seem coincidental that North Korea should have chosen this moment to come out with an explanation, via Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, of why the women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were arrested. They had crossed the frozen Tumen River and shot video inside a courtyard on the North Korean side, all in a campaign to “smear” North Korea, said the KCNA. Just where Ling and Lee, each sentenced to 12 years in prison, fit into the big picture was not clear. The KCNA said the reason it was reporting on what they had done was so the world would know “the American crimes were committed at a time when an unprecedented confrontational phase is building up on the Korean peninsula against the United States.”

The KCNA said the producer cameraman, Mitch Koss, and a Korean-Chinese guide had escaped, but neither is talking. The incident did not appear to have come up in talks between Obama and Lee or parallel conversations between their aides. There was, of course, no way to corroborate that version. No one doubted, however, the veracity of the KCNA’s claim that “we are following with a high degree of vigilance the attitude of the U.S., which spawned the criminal act against the DPRK” – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Ling and Lee, it seemed, had come to symbolize to North Korean strategists the U.S.-led response to North Korea’s emergence as a nuclear power, recognized or not. As symbols, they may be considerably more valuable than as mere pawns. Amid rhetorical flurries, they will have to wait before tensions ease – and it’s possible to negotiate their release. In the meantime, we may only hope that the “hard labor” to which they were sentenced turns out to be editing North Korean propaganda – including, perhaps, the verbal blasts against the U.S.

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